25 Things We Offer a Child When We “Just” Play A Game

I know I’m biased. I get it, people who don’t play with kids for a living don’t always know what all we’re doing when we’re playing. Sometimes parents will ask about their child’s therapy session and the child will say “we just played a game” or “we didn’t do anything.” While it may be true that we didn’t directly talk about a specific coping strategy or traumatic memory this week, it doesn’t mean nothing was going on.

It might be that kids don’t want to share that there were some more serious conversations related to whatever they’ve got going on in life, or it may be that they’re right that there was no serious “content” to speak of. A critical component of play therapy is recognizing that play is the language of children. Verbal processing “content” is usually the language of adults. Often kids don’t even know they’re doing therapy when it involves play because it just seems natural and fun.

Here are 25 things that we offer to kids when we’re playing a structured game: